Major planning meeting for large-scale German-French project EUREC4A in Barbados

With a joint press conference, on 18 and 19 February 2019 the first major planning meeting for the coordination and operational implementation of the large-scale field campaign of the EUREC4A project, starting in January 2020, took place at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH) in Barbados. EUREC4A (Elucidating the Role of Cloud-Circulation Coupling in Climate) is now launched after years of preparation on site.

The project, led by Prof Bjorn Stevens, Director of the department “The Atmosphere in the Earth System” at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), and Prof Sandrine Bony from the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD/IPSL) in Paris, is a key field experiment of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) to investigate the role of trade wind clouds in tropical climate.

The field campaign will take place from 20 January to 20 February 2020 and will be conducted by research teams from Germany, France, Caribbean institutions and American and other European participants who will collect oceanic and atmospheric data by plane, ship and ground-based. The MPI-M has been operating its own cloud observatory on Barbados for several years now.